The growing awareness of personal as well as household hygiene has positively impacted the cleaning chemical industry in the country. Even during the pandemic, when personal hygiene mattered a lot, the cleaning chemical industries got a huge boost with many popular brands entering the competition. However, if we look at the current chemical industry players, the majority of the brands are foreign brands with very few Indian brands being in the competition. To combat the foreign cleaning chemicals brands, Nidhi Malhotra started her cleaning chemical manufacturing company, ‘Harvey CleanPro’ in 2013 as a top-notch Indian alternative. Starting her professional journey as a software engineer before her entrepreneurial journey, the change in the domain was initially really tough for her with many roadblocks and challenges. However, it was her perseverance as well as "Never Give Up" attitude that has pushed the company into becoming one of the leading cleaning chemical manufacturers in the country.

In an exclusive interview with women entrepreneur, Nidhi shares her early education and experience, factors that keep her motivated and going, and much more:

What are the top three features about your expertise as a business leader that you want us to highlight through the article?

For me, topmost has been ethics and integrity. High ethical standards convey a commitment to fairness, instilling confidence that both employer and employees will honor the rules of the business game. The second important feature I see is quick decision-making. In today’s fast-changing, complex business environment, business owners need to make strategic decisions quickly even before any definitive information is available. The foremost goal is to move the organization forward, but that won’t happen if business owners can’t make decisions with wavering mind. Balancing hard truths with optimism is the third important feature especially when it’s about leading a start-up business. Owning the setbacks while motivating the team to move forward is a true test of leadership.

Shed some light on your early educational journey and the prior industry experience that you bring to the table.

After completing my B.E from CITM, Faridabad, Haryana, I joined Accenture, Bangalore in 2006 as a Software Engineer. During my seven years tenure at Accenture, I was part of three projects – United Health Group, Royal Sun Alliance and Pfizer. My work experience with Accenture taught me a lot about various business qualities such as business processes, the importance of quality work, handling client expectations, resource management, team building and management, risk management, meeting tight deadlines under immense pressure, effective communication and also enhanced my problem solving and critical thinking skills. Even my passion to start my own venture with good practical learning in hand also came from my work experience with Accenture. My entrepreneurial journey started in 2013 has been full of trials and tribulations however my prior working experience helped me in creating a business plan with clear objectives.

What are the various roles and responsibilities that you shoulder as the Director of Business Operations?

I oversee the operations of all the departments. My roles and responsibilities include planning and monitoring the day-to-day running of the business, evaluating the efficiency of business procedures according to organizational objectives and applying improvements regularly, and looking after customer support processes while organizing them to enhance customer satisfaction.

“Women empowerment is not only about others promoting women’s sense of self-worth, it should be the woman empowering herself to make her own choices”

As a business leader what are some leadership philosophies or mantras that you leverage to ensure organizational success?

My leadership mantra is to see the business beyond profits. A business that focuses on customer satisfaction, growth of employees, and growth of all other related stakeholders sees continuous development and supports profitability. High ethical standards does pay off in the long run. I also strongly believe in creating a work culture where employees can confidently raise their viewpoints irrespective of their designation and are always being listened to.

What have been some of the most significant milestones that you have achieved in your professional journey?

At ‘Harvey CleanPro’, we manufacture cleaning chemicals with superior environmental profiles, processes involved in production of our products are rigidly aligned with the principles of green chemistry. From the day one of the business, we were very clear about manufacturing quality products, to do so we spent first two and half years in products formulation and detailed testing. While our products supply was restricted to South India during our initial business years, amid tough pandemic phase, we extended our supplies across PAN India which has been one of the significant milestones we have achieved.

What has been the driving force behind your success as a business leader?

While I came across many failures during my initial entrepreneurship days, it was that fire inside me which never allowed me to stop. My willingness to learn out of every failure I faced initially and quickly adapt to different situations is something that helped me to make this startup grow. I always looked for that ‘learning lesson’ in every failure, that’s how every failure became stepping stone in achieving business milestones. As human beings, we do have negative emotions coming into our mind when we fail but one of the finest rule to achieve business success is the ability to control those emotions and keep going until you come across best ways of doing the business. It takes significant time to achieve great success, I firmly believe that success cannot be defined without acknowledging and accepting failures.

Drawing from your experience as a successful business leader, what would your advice be to young women and girls who also aspire to become business leaders and entrepreneurs in the future?

My advice to young women and girls is to look upon themselves as HUMANBEING with tremendous potential and capabilities, don’t tag yourself with ‘Female’ gender. There is no work that ‘He’ can do but ‘She’ cannot do. Women empowerment is not only about others promoting women’s sense of self-worth, it should be the woman empowering herself to make her own choices. My message to all women is – it only starts from ‘You’. If you are confident and if you believe in yourself, eventually others will also start aligning with your thought process. It’s only ‘You’ who can pass on that confidence to others that you can do it, always think that it’s all in your control.

My advice for parents is to raise both son and daughter exactly in a similar manner, along with equality they should embed strong values. Childhood years lays the foundation of life and it creates the mindset which remains with the person throughout the life.